With the budget less than a fortnight away the travel trade is boosting its attack on how high APD is and how damaging it could be for jobs and the economy if it stays at its high level. They have been boosted in that one of the few countries in Western Europe to retain such a tax has got rid of it. Ireland has removed it because it was seeing reduced tourism coming into Ireland and fewer air passengers both of which meant the tax was not raising net money but costing the economy instead. Will George Osborne, the Chancellor, take heed?

Amsterdam, the biggest city in Holland is very cosmopolitan as Holly White showed in her take on the city where she lives which appeared earlier this month. It has restaurants of all types of cuisine, indeed down some streets you can find a Burger King followed by a KFC and then a Macdonalds. There are lots of signs in English and English is widely heard because there are so many tourists. On the trains coming in from Schipol to Amsterdam Central you will hear the train guard in four different languages. So is Amsterdam typical of Holland or like many big cities, internationalised? To judge how representative it was, I took a trip half an hour away to the city of Utrecht.

Don’t countries want us to visit them? Have many got a tourism death wish that they cannot understand?
Austria has decided to follow Germany and introduce an eco- tax from January 2011 on passengers leaving from its airports. Just in time for the skiing season, the time when the largest number of visitors will be expected. They will charge €8 to fly to a European destination and €40 elsewhere. And how much will this tax bring them? Estimates vary from between €50-€70 million per year. And how much will they lose as visitors decide to go elsewhere

Last November there was a further increase in the Air Passenger Duty (APD) we UK based flyers pay. Next November it will go up yet again. In Ireland a similar tax is blamed by Ryanair for a substantial fall in the number of people visiting there and its decision to maintain quite so many planes at Dublin. It has concerned some countries that their tourism is being affected so the Netherlands has abolished the tax.
The UK is one of the most heavily taxed, if not the most heavily one for airline flights. But it doesn’t only hit people in the UK. Because of the high cost, overseas countries that rely on tourism for substantial national income are worried we won’t travel there.